The reasons for starting your own blog are many…but often include:
- Generating traffic to your online websites and internet businesses
- Building a brand and positioning yourself our your business within your industry
- Starting a buzz…viral marketing
- An alternative way to communicate with your customers or marketplace – other than email for example
- You have opinions that diverge from the mainstream that you want to get out
Whatever your purpose, the question comes down to…once you get your blog setup and launched…what do you do next to start getting traffic and eyeballs to read your blog.
Here are 5 tips that will help you turn your awesome blog into something that people see and read:
1. Get posting. I’ve know of many people that get their blog all setup and ready to go and then take weeks to make their first post. It doesn’t matter what you do to optimize your blog, if you aren’t posting at least daily, then it won’t matter. So, don’t worry about getting things perfect, start posting NOW.
2. Make sure you have a basic "Ping" list of the top blog directories...both blogger and WordPress give you a place to cut and paste a list of common ping URL’s that will update the major blog directories (like Bloglines, Yahoo, etc…) to your new post including a title and description. This will give you a backlink, get your blog extra attention from the search engines and start generating traffic for you.
3. Wordpres Plugins, you’ll find about 5 common plugins that help optimize your wordpress blog for the search engines. You will find plugins that allow you to add meta tags against your blog postings, a title optimizer such as SEO Title Tag (do a good search) and Ultimate Tag Warrior, Google Sitemaps Generator plugin for WordPress. I also like the Related Posts plugin to keep people reading multiple posts when they come in on one specific post. Don’t get too fancy – stick with 5-6 plugins for optimization rather than jumping at every single little plugin you come across.
4. Be interesting and targeted. First and foremost, your posts should be informative, entertaining, personal, and interesting – but then look for ways to target specific "long-tail" keyword phrases – it may take a while, but eventually you can see these long-tail posts rising quite far on the search engines.
5. Setup Categories with keywords. When you post to WordPress, you will be asked what Category to add the post too – assign a category that defines a strong keyword focus for your posting (keeping in mind future postings you will make in this area as well). Ideally, you want to end up with maximum 10-15 categories that represent strong keywords and keyword phrases across your marketplace.
These 5 tips will help you quickly attract traffic and interest to your blogs…but it demands that you get started now and not wait for everything to be perfect.
Another common question is "what do I post to my blog" – especially when you are faced with posting daily or even multiple postings each day…we cover the topic of how to quickly find content to post on your blog inside of InfoMarketer’sZone
